Internet of Things (IoT)

IoT is a very broad term and the whole IoT world can be divided in three main layers:

Edge - contains the things in IoT, end-nodes which are usually the small networked devices with interfaces to real world like sensors, actuators or cameras

Gateway - devices that collect and aggregate data from multiple end-nodes and provide internet connection and protocol to send data to the third layer

Services - comprised of clouds for data storage and processing and a platform for the end-user applications

Aldec provides FPGA-based solutions for the Gateway and Services layers of IoT infrastructure.

IoT Gateway

Based on the TySOM board, Aldec delivers an IoT Gateway reference design developed using Xilinx Zynq FPGA. The TySOM Gateway runs on the core of embedded Linux used as a host that provides Internet LAN or WAN (wired or WiFi connection) and handles cloud protocols designated for IoT applications such as MQTT protocol used by the Amazon Cloud (AWS). On the other side the TySOM gateway supports multiple wireless and wired protocols used to build Personal Area Networks (PAN) comprising of Edge layer devices. Currently the supported protocols include Bluetooth, Z-wave, ZigBee, WiFi and USB.

Additionally the Xilinx Zynq device used on TySOM boards is powerful enough to implement advanced processing algorithms on the data collected from the Edge. The data can be filtered, compressed or encrypted before sending to the cloud so the TySOM gateway is not just a simple traffic router but an advanced device which allows to optimize costs of IoT Cloud and Services and handle hundreds of Edge nodes in an organization. The TySOM Gateway also includes an Android end-user application and web server examples that can be used to access and control Edge nodes directly from the TySOM board.

IoT Services/Cloud Infrastructure

IoT Services and Cloud providers face a big challenge of enormous amount of data storage, management and processing. They have to provide reliable and responsive solutions to the end users, application developers and to billions of devices (the things) interconnected. Machine to Machine (M2M) communication should take fraction of second which imposes a huge demand on network infrastructure innovations and rises the bars for servers efficiency. At the same time power consumption must be minimized. This is why IoT service providers like Amazon or Google open up for new technologies to construct turbo-processors that accelerate data processing algorithms running on the servers. The FPGA technology is often chosen for its computation potential and power efficiency.

The HES-7 accelerator board contains two largest Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA and DDR3 external memory slot supporting up to 8GB of RAM. These resources allow to implement complex algorithms as pipelined hardware accelerators or coprocessors. High speed PCI Express link and standard AMBA AXI based local bus in FPGA allows transferring data between the host and the HES board at speeds exceeding 2GB/s. The cutting edge FPGA devices forged in 28nm silicon process provides power efficiency outperforming graphic processors (GPU) that could be considered as an alternative solution. For organizations lacking from FPGA technology experience Aldec provides engineering support and HPC application integration services.

Main Features

Aldec HES-7 accelerator board in two configurations - with Virtex-7 2000T or 690T

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